Abstract

The corporations have been slow to recognize certain changes in the structure and in the value system of our society and to adapt to them. This lag has been due in part to the persistence with which corporate managers have continued to look at society as a static system, to defend their actions in terms of nineteenth-century ideology rather than late twentieth-century reality, and to pursue the improvement of their subsystem without proper regard for the effects on other subsystems or on the system as a whole. The continuing lack of recognition by the corporation of the need for a new perception of its own social role has increased the degree of incompatibility between corporate goals and values and those of society at large. It also helps to account for failures by many corporations to develop new strategies for dealing with outside pressures and with emerging interest groups and to restructure their decision making machinery for greater flexibility and responsiveness to the challenges produced by unconventional and unusual changes in external environmental conditions. It is also been discussed that these failures to develop new strategies and organizational structures appropriately designed to cope with rapidly changing conditions.